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2009. május 30. Make your site more visible to search engines! By pgoode @ 14:46 :: 3427 Views :: 0 Comments Want to make your site more visible to search engine traffic? Want to drive more traffic from your site to your door? Well, there's really no magic wand for this. It all has to do with real, readable content. Don't be fooled by some folks promising to get you at the number one spot on Google. There's no one trick to getting on top of a search. It is diligent, tedious & sometimes laborious work. Though it is good to have a Goode Design's Web Development team behind your search engine efforts, most businesses can manage a lion's share of the task in-house. Here are some of the basics: The Elusive Search Engine Rank: You must understand that your search engine ranking is an organic, flowing & ever-changing status. Sometimes, you may rank high on one search term, and other keywords you may lag behind. Work with Goode Design to develop a game plan to bring your site more traffic by doing the following: List search engine keywords you feel are important to your business and site traffic. List keywords + the name of the cities & geographic areas you service. List alternate keywords (what other words are used to describe your product or service?) List your direct & indirect search competitors (sometimes this can be the manufacturers of the products you sell) List objectives you wish to accomplish with your site (drive web traffic, drive location traffic, awareness, sales, calls, etc.) The Base-Line: It is best to have Goode Design develop a comprehensive baseline of your internet footprint. This includes measuring your current site's keyword footprint and search engine ranking from various perspectives. However, if you're simply looking to gather a look at where you stand, you can do a few steps to gain a little perspective where your site ranks with other sites. First off, you can use google's tools at www.google.com/webmasters/start to gain some knowledge of how well your site is ranking. Google has large selection of tools that some users may feel comfortable analyzing their site's performance. However, you don't have to be a web guru to get a feel from your site's performance. Another way to judge your site's search ranking is by performing some rudimentary searches of for keywords pertaining to your product or service. Write down where you fall on the first two pages. Generally speaking, you want your site to be found by keyword on the first 2 pages, preferably within the first 4 listings. Be sure to search your keyword + geographic area also. Note: Some keywords are inherently oversaturated (e.g. real estate) regardless of your location and may require more work to drive internet traffic. However, there are ways to keep traffic moving and improving. Content is King! Have your site swapped to a DotNetNuke Content Managed Site. This may seem apart from the need to improve search engine traffic, but most business owners do not have a full-time IT or web development department that is able to help them implement quick, needed changes to their site. By swapping your site to a Content Managed site, you and your staff can quickly be trained to make content changed to your site on a regular & needed basis. The key component of search traffic is Content. The best way to continually improve your site's search ranking is to have fresh, valid content on your site that benefits your customer base. By continually infusing keywords into your site with relevant content, Google & other search engines will begin to reward your efforts with rising rankings. Your goal is to put your search terms into your content so that it shows up betweek 4 to 18 times depending on the length of the text. By adding new pages and refreshing content of older pages, this allows google to see that your site is working to remain relevant to the web users' needs. Free is Goode! There are plenty of free things you can do to drive traffic to your site: Continue to refresh & contribute keyword rich content to your DotNetNuke website. Start a blog at http://www.blogger.com with valid & helpful content and links to your site or specific pages on your site. Start a forum with topics on your DotNetNuke website. Contribute valid, keyword rich comments on other popular blogs, forums & web communities. Contribute articles to online periodicals, blogs & e-zines. Become a resource & knowledge base within your industry to other online communities. Create a helpful FAQ and Knowledge base system on your DotNetNuke website. Be sure your external web contributions are helpful, content rich information. People avoid sites and links they feel aren't leading to their desired goal. Users are quite adept at seeing search engine spam. Don't clutter the internet with seemingly useless links. People will judge the link by the content around it. Start your own: At times, it's necessary to start some online marketing from scratch. If you've researched and found no forums, blogs or user groups online where you can become an active contributor, then it's time to start your own! Begin with a blog as they are simple and easy to manage whether through a free blogging service like Blogger or by adding one to your DotNetNuke site. Continually infuse your keyword search terms into your blog and feed links to your site. If you are typing memos, notes and emails to customers or for press releases, repost the same content to your blog with an in bound link to your site. Start a press-release or news section to your DotNetNuke site where you can post updates and news items regarding your industry and company. Forums are fairly quick to set up in a DotNetNuke Site and easy to manage. Beginning a myspace page, facebook page, linkedin page, google group user group or yahoo group can help by bringing traffic as well as creating a new online community. So long as you're not creating something random or obscure, you're likely to benefit your site. One note of caution: be sure that your online group is not harder to market than your site. Facebook allows your site to create fan pages and then immediately tell your facebook friends about your group and springboard the marketing process A note about forums: With a DotNetNuke forum, you are able to manage the type of content that is allowed on your site. Thus you're able to inhibit inappropriate content to some degree, though you still have to watch out for people who use forums for their own means (trolls). In the same way others do not want you to use their forum as a way to shamelessly plug your site, service or product, you will have to manage the content of your own forum with the same level of diligence. However, your site is able to benefit from user-generated content that is highly rich in keywords. This allows your users to contribute to improving your search engine rankings. Linking: You probably know many industry specific sites, magazines and other online resources. One way to boost your ranking is by having incoming links that build your search popularity. You can purchase Google Adwords and allow google to place small ads in seemingly relevant places on the web. Additionally, you can ask other companies for the opportunity to have a link posted on their site to yours. Sometimes a reciprocating link may be requested. Reciprocal links are better than nothing, but you should prefer links that do not reciprocate. Possibly discuss adding a link to a partner site or to your suppliers' site. It may require a financial agreement, but it may pay back dividends in the future. Moving Forward: When you've added your last blog, forum post and sentence to your site, it's time to let some time pass and evaluate what improvements you've made. After a span of time, you will want to regularly perform a similar baseline test on your site over the next year. Evaluate what worked, what didn't and what you want to push further. Continually keep a list of your site's keyword search terms nearby when writing anything. Anytime you write anything, consider how it could be reworded to include your keywords and then repurposed to create more content to benefit your site. We hope this helps you to build a great website, generate lots of traffic and build a booming business in the days to come.

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